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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22405312">Pisonia: The Birdcatcher Trees</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baryshnikov/pseuds/Baryshnikov'>Baryshnikov</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Politics, British Politics, Dubious Ethics, Exploitation, F/M, Implied/Referenced Cheating, M/M, Manipulative Tom Riddle, Mind Games, Moral Ambiguity, Morally Grey Harry Potter, Obsession, Paranoia, Police Officer Harry Potter, Politician Tom Riddle, Politics, Psychopathology &amp; Sociopathy, Seduction, Sexual Content, Timeline What Timeline</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-01-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-01-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 02:55:25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,619</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22405312</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baryshnikov/pseuds/Baryshnikov</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Tom Riddle is parasitic and Harry will prove it, even if it kills him.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Abraxas Malfoy/Tom Riddle (referenced), Bellatrix Black Lestrange/Tom Riddle (referenced), Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley (past), Harry Potter/Tom Riddle</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>48</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>So this just sort of happened, my bad.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Harry shifted in his chair, despite the apparent expense of this place, the chairs were uncomfortable, scratching at his back through his clothes and making him itch all over. A part of him was beginning to regret this plot in its entirety, though its foundations remained to be solid. Harry stopped shifting in his seat and looked up across the restaurant, it was ugly but whether because of the <em>particular</em> design of the tables and the pattern of the wallpaper, or a mere accident of colours and poor adaptation of whatever this building used to be, Harry couldn’t tell.</p>
<p>The primary problem, although no one else seemed as concerned about it as he was, was the lighting. There was something lurid in its colour; a blunt orange slashed forcibly over the room, it struck out from the bulbs like punches and illuminated everything that it touched in a burning glaze. Even the salad that Harry was picking his way through was not spared the garish colour, in fact, it seemed heavier when orange splayed over the white plate and curled its way between the leaves of lettuce, before depositing itself on the small cubes of feta in blooming patches of rust-like mould.</p>
<p>Without enthusiasm, Harry stabbed another mouthful of leaves and ate them slowly; this was by no means his meal of choice, but this restaurant was expensive, and he wasn’t here for the food. Swallowing he sighed and glanced at the chair opposite, poignantly empty with just his coat slung over the back. It had seemed too petty to ask them to move it for the sake of his pride. </p>
<p>As if to emphasise his aloneness, not loneliness because he wasn’t lonely, he was just alone, the party at the table just across the way, erupted into laughter again. It was a jangling noise, filled up to the brim with pleasantries and camaraderie; just people enjoying their lives. They were the only ones making noise, and Harry wondered briefly whether the other customers here, although there weren’t many, knew who it was sitting there, and <em>that</em> was the reason none of them complained at the mirth that swilled from the table and swamped the atmosphere around it in this ease that was light enough to prickle at Harry’s skin. </p>
<p>Harry inclined his head and looked over the menu. He could the table, laughing together, an intimate party of six, equally spaced around a circular table; between them were gaps and through the gaps, Harry caught slices of smiles and the movements of hands telling stories. Some of their heads were bent forward, hiding smiles, others were bent back, shameless in their amusement, but either way, their eyes were directed towards the same seat. They each watched the same man, who was at the unofficial, and even non-existent in this case, head of the table. </p>
<p>Tom Riddle. </p>
<p>Amongst all those sitting around that table, he was only one that Harry cared to see. Though the desire to observe was not borne from an excessive fondness, but rather from distrust and an inherent dislike that balanced so precariously on the line of abhorrent loathing. Unlike everyone else, he had no affections for Riddle; that man was a disease, cruel, chronic and contagious. He infected those around him with a giddy mix of confidence and aspiration that made them sweet, and then he rotted them from the inside out.</p>
<p>The simple way of putting it was that the man was parasitic. </p>
<p>People were simply too blinded by the glittering, altruistic, version of himself that he presented, to notice that was peeling at the corners and frayed down the edges. They didn’t see that there was something <em>wrong</em> under his skin; and that for every altruistic act there were another three egotistical ones.</p>
<p>So too did they all <em>choose</em> to ignore the venal, practically sycophantic, people he associated himself with: the rich and the elite, and how that juxtaposed with those that he professed to advocate on behalf of, the poverty-stricken and the downtrodden, the <em>ignored</em> in society. Nobody seemed to <em>see</em> the insincerity in his smiles. Those two sides were frankly incompatible, and soon they’d split apart, and then everyone would see what sort of person spilled out. </p>
<p>Harry pulled his chair closer to the table and skewered a cube of orange-stained feta. The table was still laughing intermittently, though the moments were now punctuated by long stretches of quiet discussion. If Harry craned his neck a little, he could see through the breaks in their little circle and see each of their faces. </p>
<p>He knew all of them that sat around that table, everyone who knew the structure of Riddle’s politics did. This was the clique where the political magic, as it were, happened before it was coated with a shiny veneer and rolled out to the masses. Harry glared at them. Druella Rosier, Alexander Avery, Calliope-Jane Mulciber, Bellatrix Lestrange, Abraxas Malfoy, and Riddle himself, each of them had a function: the lawyer, the financier, the journalist, the strategist, the landowner. </p>
<p>Of course, he wouldn’t admit it, but Harry had a picture of every one of them pinned up in his study </p>
<p>Why wouldn’t he?</p>
<p>These people were pervasive, not just in politics, but in public life like run-off chemicals they seeped into the waterways of finance and journalism and law leaving behind an ideological trail so distinctively Riddle’s. </p>
<p>So how could Harry not be suspicious of this ‘once-in-a-generation’ politician, that’s what they all called him, destined to shake the very foundations of British society, they all said. Words, endless, meaningless words of praise whispered in his ear, probably as they had been for his entire life, and Harry knew that life, back to front and inside out. He knew where Riddle had gone to boarding school. He knew where he’d gone to university and he knew that he’d graduated with a first-class degree in law. He knew that Riddle was one of the best up-and-coming commercial litigators in the business, and he knew that he had inexplicably thrown all that away to enter politics seven years ago. </p>
<p>In fact, Harry knew everything, well, <em>almost</em> everything.</p>
<p>The only thing that continued to elude him, no matter how hard he looked, were these strange, unaccountable gaps that didn’t make any sense; prolonged periods, one just after he left university and one just before he entered politics, where Riddle seemed to just dematerialise from every single publicly available record for over a year, before reappearing far higher on the societal scale than he’d ever been previously.</p>
<p>If that did not ooze impropriety, then nothing ever would. </p>
<p>If the general public were not persuaded to be suspicious by unexplainable absences followed by quite the ideological and popularity renaissance, then they would never be persuaded by anything – and they should not be trusted to make the decisions of this country anymore.</p>
<p>As Harry continued to watch, Rosier and Mulciber separated and between them was an empty space emerged and for just a moment he could see Riddle clearly. But he only needed a moment, for Riddle’s image was one that rarely needed longer than a second to imprint itself so forcedly into someone’s mind; it was equal parts pervasive and painful and completely unforgettable. Before Harry had seen him for the first time, he had never believed in a beauty that could be so stark that it stung his eyes to see. </p>
<p>That was for trashy romance novels and bygone legends of antiquity based more in falsehood than fact.</p>
<p>Yet, the reaction was still there, Harry couldn’t deny that; it hovered low and loud in the corner of his mind, and he couldn’t help but compared it mosquito, just another parasitic organism that took what it wanted and gave nothing back.</p>
<p>The gap had widened again, and Riddle stayed visible, his hand resting on a small pile of papers that blended with the table, and Harry was only able to see at all because of the dark shadow from where one corner was upturned. Other than that, he was smiling in amusement, his mouth curved, and his head tilted to the side. From a purely objective perspective, Riddle had a provocative sort of attractiveness, the type that would get a man with less restraint into trouble. </p>
<p>But Riddle had restraint, and self-control and discipline; he was, apparently, quite willing to play a very long game in order to get what he wanted at the end, which was fine because Harry was happy to play the long game too. To keep following him and learning about him, until he finally spotted the fatal flaw in his formula and tore open everything that he was to reveal the sickly centre that would be so repugnant to the world. </p>
<p>The fantasy was one he so liked to indulge, that Harry didn’t notice Riddle was looking right at him until there was a prickling on the back of his neck. </p>
<p>Harry looked up and then quickly dipped himself behind the drinks menu and tried to ignore it. Riddle probably hadn’t even noticed him, after all, multiple people had looked at him already, looked him right in the eye and seen nothing because he was so much lower on the social strata than they were. In their eyes, he was no better than the waitstaff, probably worse because he had no value that they could exploit for their personal gain. </p>
<p>The atmosphere around the group was changing now, conversations petering out, becoming nothing more than gentle murmurs like a fine haze of rain. Mulciber was the first to stand up, the others followed her, getting up, one by one, and each bidding their goodbyes; Avery, Mulciber and Rosier with just a smile, Malfoy with the touch of his hand across Riddle’s shoulder, and Lestrange with a kiss on his cheek. Despite the intimacy, there was also a formality staining the interaction, as though physical and emotional parameters had not only been drawn up and handed out in colour coordinated pamphlets but were also rigorously enforced.</p>
<p>Riddle stayed seated.  </p>
<p>Carefully, he watched his friends as they left the restaurant, but as soon as they were gone he went back to leaf through the papers in front of him, occasionally tapping his finger on the table when he came to a part he didn’t appear to like.</p>
<p>Harry continued to push his salad around his plate, not intending to eat any more of the unidentifiable greenery, and every so often glancing up to watch how Riddle smiled at and spoke to the waitstaff and then continued to scan page after page. Though he wasn’t particularly contemplative, rather it was a casual glance, one that suggested he was merely checking other people’s work, as opposed to fully reviewing it or indeed intending to extensively amend it.  </p>
<p>It was peaceful to watch, but also unnerving, every time that Riddle tapped his finger, Harry found himself swallowing and wondering which part of his history Riddle was now trying to hide away. After all, there were certainly enough rumours of the things he hid, albeit rumours that had never been substantiated nor corroborated, and Harry was sure that Riddle himself had done as best he could to bury them in the depths of national archives only to be found by the most dedicated commentators. Much like those gaps in his resume, and indeed his life, that blotted his otherwise sleek-smooth reputation, curated to absolute perfection. </p>
<p>But even the finest curator, much like the finest dressmaker could not hide the imperfections that were inherent, merely disguise them. That was all that Riddle did, cover up his misdeeds and his secrets and all his transgressions with the wet earth, before planting brightly coloured flowers to distract anyone who came digging in his garden. </p>
<p>Not that that stopped things being buried there, rather it only made them more tantalising to find. </p>
<p>Such as his implicit involvement in the rather high-profile deteriorating marriage of Malfoy; perhaps it was the power of money or the lack of establishment of the fifth estate had enabled him to scrape through that with barely a blemish on his name, but that didn’t stop his signature being smothered all over the entire affair. After all, anyone who looked could see that there was something that should have been there, an empty space hung over every article, from the reputable newspapers to the tabloids. There was something missing from the picture, a break, or a perhaps a tear in the careful fabric of history, and that something was Riddle. </p>
<p>If that had been the only instance, then Harry would have been a fool to waste his time on the man. But it wasn’t. In fact, that was the first time, and there had been many incidences since when a shadow splayed itself across a scandal, and all the threads that Harry could find led back to Riddle, like strings of a web leading straight to the spider’s nest.</p>
<p>And no one else saw. </p>
<p>No one else <em>wanted</em> to see. </p>
<p>They closed their eyes to each and every warning sign, like that government minister who’d disagreed with and so publicly denounced a bill that Riddle had expressed such an interest in, who’d then found himself embroiled in the most salacious of scandals that he had been removed post-haste, without so much as a single word from the government in his defence. The press had had quite the field day scrutinising every inch of that story and yet, between each word and every line, there was no mention of Riddle’s name. </p>
<p>The same thing was true for the fall and subsequent revival of Bellatrix Lestrange, who still, to this day, kissed him on the cheek. It was the same well-worn story of an older man and a younger woman, not much of an age difference, but enough that experience had the lead part and naivety played its love interest. For nearly two years, he was there in every picture, a ubiquitous presence pulling every string and commanding her every smile. All she’d been back then was a student who’d got herself into something bigger and far more radical than she could handle, the result of which had been swift and violent and mostly redacted. Now though, she was far more respectable, but Riddle’s hands were dirtier because of it, you just had to look at the grip of his fingers on her shoulder to know that.  </p>
<p>Harry was watching his hands again now as they continued to thumb through. They were undeniably <em>nice</em> hands, but then again, <em>everything</em> about Riddle was nice on the surface, rather like a Pisonia tree he was bright and colourful and superficially lovely, but he had nasty secrets and malicious habits that would undoubtedly cause more harm in the future than they had done already. </p>
<p>But still, there was no point denying that the man could wear a suit well; in fact, it would be a disadvantage to ignore such an obvious gesture. Clothes so often defined a person, which begged the question, what did a tailored shirt that fitted so obscenely well and no other discernible accessories on his person, say about Riddle?</p>
<p>Harry didn’t want to think about the answer to that. For none of the things his brain supplied seemed remotely appropriate, nor did they properly converge with how he <em>should</em> be thinking of the man with too much power, and too few moral, at his fingertips. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, neither Riddle’s looks, nor his own ambiguity towards them should detract from the fact that there was something rather sticky and unreliable woven right into his skin like embroidery. The simple way that he smiled like he knew everyone’s secrets, and that he was perfectly willing to exploit them for his own personal gain if they didn’t do as he required. </p>
<p>He’d done it before, Harry knew that. </p>
<p>Anyone you asked could recall the second wave of the expenses scandal, a decade after the first, but few could pinpoint that the reveal only began after a, quite nasty, if the rumours that he’d managed to prize out of the civil service were anything to go by, disagreement between Riddle and a backbencher. No one mentioned Riddle’s name, but he was there like he had been before, and everything when went really rather smoothly for him after she’d been so quickly, and so surgically, removed from the chamber. </p>
<p>If that alone wasn’t enough evidence, then there was the fact that Riddle had been snaking his way so insidiously into Ginny’s life; nothing newsworthy to a publishing corporation perhaps, but still important. Not that Harry <em>really</em> minded, after all, they’d broken up over two months ago now and she was entitled to do whatever she liked with her time. Except that, despite himself, Harry still cared about her, and regardless of whether or not it was a purely innocent association, Riddle wasn’t <em>good</em> for anyone in <em>any</em> respect. </p>
<p><em>That</em> was why he was here, sitting in an upscale hotel’s restaurant that he really couldn’t afford, watching a man he hated because if no one else was going to do anything about him, then Harry would have to do it all himself. He would have to take on the role that was loathed by the contemporary but honoured in history, of the one person who saw through the clouded deceit and exposed what Riddle really was. Show everything that slippery, serpentine side of him that he was – </p>
<p>Someone interrupted his thoughts. “Would you like to come over?” the voice said, smooth and silky-soft, “or are you contented with sitting there and pretending that I can’t see you watching me?”</p>
<p>Harry sat still and stared at his plate, with the wilting salad and dyed orange moisture. There was a coldness settling in the base of his stomach and his mouth had become inexplicably dry. He didn’t need to be particularly observant to know who’d spoken, and to know that he’d pushed his luck just that inch too far, and now he had to get out of it as hospitably as possible. </p>
<p>Slowly, Harry raised his head towards the table just across the way, from there Riddle was watching him, his forearm stretched across the table and his fingers tapping at the tablecloth. Despite the distance, Harry could hear the low, continuous sound. Riddle was still smiling, the same highly attractive, but also highly poisonous smile spread over his mouth like an infectious disease. “Well, are you coming over?” he said, his nails tapping harder on the table. </p>
<p>It was an order if Harry had ever heard one, though framed in the niceties of a question, as though that would fool people into thinking Riddle was being polite. He wasn’t. But he probably just thought that Harry was a journalist with unscrupulous morals and too much free time, but he could work with that, after all, a single admonishment from a man who didn’t even know his name, was hardly going to derail this entire operation. </p>
<p>So, with a sigh, Harry pushed back his chair and walked over.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He was scarcely a couple of steps towards the table before Riddle was leaning back in his chair, the light curling itself around the bones in his face and a smile slashed across his mouth that was different than before; this one said he was far more amused with himself than the circumstances really warranted.<br/>
“Harry Potter,” he said, just loud enough for Harry to hear, but no one else, and taken his time to slowly savour each syllable with his tongue like it was candy, “I suppose, it’s a pleasure to meet you in the flesh.” </p><p>Harry stopped. He was still a few steps from where Riddle was sitting, but there was a coldness in the base of his spine that really suggested it wasn’t worth going any further. It was the abject horror of being known; no longer was he and merely a shadow that sat across a restaurant, now he was tangible, and with tangibility comes vulnerability. Though, if Riddle noted his discomfort, he didn’t voice it, but whether that could be considered a blessing to be allowed a moment of embarrassed silence without verbal judgement, or a curse to know, and indeed have it brought to ultimate attention, that Riddle wasn’t as ignorant as he’d hoped. </p><p>“Though,” Riddle said, and Harry was close enough now to see how he dragged his eyes up, and then let them fall back down like a fairground ride, each time pulling back another layer and looking deeper into him, “it’s just a <em>shame</em> that it had to be like this, don’t you think?”</p><p>The coldness continued to crawl up to the back of his skull. Harry swallowed. “Like what?” he said carefully, and he hoped casually, whilst trying to ignore the fact that, apparently, Riddle knew his name. Though it probably wasn’t that hard to find out, perhaps, he’d just overheard the hostess earlier, after all, they’d come in soon after one another <em>and</em> they sat near each other. </p><p>Riddle had every rational reason to know his name, but still, he was… unnervingly casual in his use of it. </p><p>“Harry, please, you were doing your very best to conduct surveillance on me – ” Harry tried to interrupt that point, and at least attempt to refute it, but Riddle just raised his fingers up from the table and let them stay suspended in the air, waiting, as a teacher might for an unruly class to settle down. “It’s obvious,” he said a little louder, “what’s less obvious though, is <em>why</em> you were doing it, given that it's somewhat outside of your personal remit, wouldn’t you say?”<br/>
As he said it, Riddle tipped his head to the side and smiled again, the hand lowering down and stretching itself over the tablecloth.</p><p>“You know, I wasn’t actually,” Harry said softly, but he hoped sharply, as though there were lines of steel running between each letter. He glared at Riddle’s hand, watching how the light dappled across it; little specks of orange that blurred into long lines of shadows.</p><p>“Oh, you weren’t, were you? Then might I ask what you <em>were</em> doing?”</p><p>“I was out to dinner,” Harry said, trying his best to stop his fingers still; the last thing he needed now was to be caught fiddling with the hem of his t-shirt or making holes in the ends sleeves like a nervous schoolboy. Particularly, when Riddle sat there as calm and sophisticated as an oil painting, watching him like he was simply a passing view. </p><p>“That’s quite the curious coincidence, don’t you think, Harry?” </p><p>There was a silence after that, probably because it was true. Coincidences of that magnitude were rare at the best of times and now didn’t seem like the best of times at all. So they stayed, watched each other in silence that sat poignant and heavy, coating the entire restaurant floor like treacle, and absorbing every tiny sound until it felt like it was just the two of them. Him and Riddle. Riddle and him. Riddle watching and Harry being watched, and it was such a way to be watched that ‘watching’ was hardly the word for it; there was too much feeling imbued into it, too much concentration. Rather it felt like he was being stripped of his skin, having Riddle’s fingers peel it back inch by inch, and slowly push their way around his insides, squishing and smoothing and squeezing, until they found what they wanted. </p><p>Harry swallowed again; this wasn’t quite what <em>he’d</em> wanted out of the night, though what he <em>had</em> wanted was not a question he could answer either. Perhaps, this was what he had always been aiming for, an acknowledgement that he was a complication that Riddle couldn’t deny, a recognition that he was standing here in the tangible flesh, an apperception of sorts for the justice that he was so forcefully pressing for.<br/>
“That we’re both out isn’t particularly coincidental,” he said, a lie that already felt false in his mouth; it wasn’t helped that the words come out quieter than he expected, as though a subconscious part of him could read the silent formality of the room and hastened to mimic it. “People go out all the time,” he added when Riddle stayed painfully silent. The extra words were hardly of value though; they were merely additional letters strung together on a string, designed for human palatability and no more. They meant nothing. </p><p>And they continued to mean nothing, even when Riddle took the time to maintain the silence, choosing instead to roll each of those letters over his tongue, tasting them like he <em>could</em> find a hidden meaning in them.</p><p>“Well,” he said, still soft and low; if they hadn’t been framed by chairs and tables and patrons, Harry would almost have said the tone was sultry, but given that they were surrounded by such things, it seemed to tip the balance into polite properness.<br/>
“Of course, <em>they</em> do,” Riddle continued, gesturing vaguely to the few other couples here, “but <em>you</em> don’t exactly live around here, do you, Harry? And even if you did, as far as I was aware, your weeknight routine tends to consist of late nights at the office, followed by a takeout from one of the four reasonably reputable, but still somewhat bargain, restaurants near you flat, where you then eat, alone.”</p><p>There was nothing to say for a moment, and Harry could feel his mouth, dry, and opening and closing like the most cognitively immobilised fish just floating in the water, waiting to be eaten by something bigger and hungrier. Though it was also hardly a surprise, if he thought about it this was the sort of behaviour that he would expect from someone whose moral code was so corrupted that it was scandal-worthy by itself. Surveillance, after all, was hardly the most difficult manoeuvre, simply the most invasive, and before he could stop himself, Harry was glancing over his shoulder. His eyes passing over the door and the window, and each of the other diners sitting at their tables. Were they watching him? </p><p>Was this entire evening an elaborate ruse to get him in a small confined space, where striking him down and taking him apart for appropriate disposal would be so much easier?</p><p>Clearly reading him like a data set, Riddle smiled. All teeth and little sentiment that wasn’t, at least founded in sadistic ideologies. “No one’s watching you right now, Harry, other than me that is,” he said, his hand beginning to tap against the table again. </p><p>“So, someone <em>has</em> been watching me?” Harry said, sounding a little more unsure than he would have liked. He’d always thought he was good with his surroundings, that he could read the mood of a room quite well, and he could tell when something was off. But apparently that had been another misconception of his, and now he couldn’t shake the cold slithering into the base of his stomach.</p><p>“<em>Obviously</em>,” Riddle said with a mild wave of his hand, as though it were no big thing, and perhaps it wasn’t when you were in the business of involving yourself so intimately in other people’s lives without their knowledge. “Don’t worry yourself though, it’s merely a matter of formality, after all, you are rather making yourself into quite the nuisance for me.”</p><p>“No comment.”</p><p>Riddle dipped his head and smiled, a hand running through his hair so that Harry found himself watching, a little too intently, the lines of Riddle’s fingers; the sharpness of the bones and the soft skin that must have been quite pale to be coloured with such a nauseating shade of orange.<br/>
“I’d just like to point out, though, that I outsourced my work to a legitimate business,” he said, “one that is quite aware of the pitfalls of contravening the Protection from Harassment Act, nineteen-ninety-seven.”</p><p>That coldness flared up again, spreading further along the base of his spine and pressing itself against his pelvis and sliding down into his intestines so that his entire body felt uneasy with the way that Riddle was watching him, and, perhaps even more with the things he was saying. But Harry didn’t say anything, he’d rather wait and see where <em>exactly</em> Riddle was planning on heading with this line of musing.</p><p>He didn’t have to wait long.</p><p>“You, on the other hand,” Riddle said, before pausing and clicking his tongue, “employ a more… vigilante technique and, as a result, have been in infringement of that Act for a good two months now.” He paused again, this time to lie his left arm lazily over the back of his chair, and to let a smile spread further over his face, “but don’t worry, I won’t tell.”</p><p>“Won’t tell who what?” Harry said slowly. </p><p>For a moment, Riddle studied his face, as though he was trying to work out exactly where <em>Harry</em> was attempting to steer the discussion.<br/>
“I won’t report you to your own police department and say that you’ve been stalking me, Harry; causally for at least five months, and professionally for two, mostly on your days off, but just recently you’ve been doing it between shifts too.” He continued to tap his fingers, though now the sound was morphing into a nursery rhyme type tune, with just enough buoyancy to be unsettling. “If you want, I can even say that it’s making me worry about my safety and that it’s compromising my ability to work.”</p><p>Harry kept his face steady and his eyes on Riddle’s; it would have been a sign of weakness to look away now, and that was the last thing he wanted. Neutrality was always the best policy in the face of hostility, even if such hostility was hidden behind a pretty smile.  </p><p>“But, as I said,” Riddle continued, “I won’t tell.” </p><p>“What’s…?” Harry started, shifting his weight from foot to foot and wondering whether any of the other diners thought it was weird that he had been standing in, what was, practically, the centre of the dining area for a good ten minutes, clearly not looking comfortable in his skin. For a brief moment, the terrible thought that they were all in on it too seeped into him again. He glanced nervously at the nearest couple, they looked innocent enough, but you could never really tell. “…What’s the catch?”</p><p>“Have a drink with me.”</p><p>It was so forward that Harry almost took a physical step back in surprise. “What?” he said; he’d been prepared for quite a number of exchanges, but not that one. Rather, he’d expected frustration or contempt or even good old-fashioned disgust, but not… civility that strung itself awfully close to outright geniality. Apparently, his face must have shown his feelings quite obviously because Riddle rolled his eyes and somehow made it look good.  </p><p>“I know you heard me, but I’ll indulge you, I asked you to have a drink with me, Harry, and in return, I won’t, at the very minimum, file an improper conduct complaint with the head of your department.” </p><p>Harry didn’t say anything</p><p>“Or,” he said, dipping his tone into something lower and rough around the edges, “if you’d prefer, I can sue you for an injunction, which I would get, Harry, trust me on that one.” His tone suggested he was serious, and why shouldn’t he be? So too was there a look in his eyes that made Harry think he was quite happy to make a scene of it if he didn’t comply.  </p><p>When Harry stayed silently looking at the table, his jaw moving with the words he wanted to say, but couldn’t, Riddle continued, “so, I would say, the ball is in your court, as it were,” he said, “and if you want to keep your… little hobby going, then I suggest you accept.” He continued to smile even as he said it; but not a single smile, rather, a whole variety of slightly shifting ones that made Harry uncomfortable.</p><p>“Isn’t that blackmail?” he said.</p><p>“I suppose…” Riddle said, with far too much casualness for what was a serious, and imprisonable, crime, “…that you could call it a flimsy form of blackmail, does that bother you?” The question was strangely sincere, as though he did genuine <em>care</em> whether Harry found it offensive. But before he could query it, Riddle was talking again, “because, I mean, it was your own indiscretions that got you into this situation in the first place, not to mention, there’s only your word that I actually <em>did</em> try to blackmail you.”</p><p>When he put it like that there was a logic, not pleasant logic, and not logic that Harry had ever intended to find himself on the receiving end of, but nonetheless, it was logical. Harry turned his gaze to the floor, examining the colouring of the tiles and the odd texture that surely must have made some of the tables wobble. Around him was the gentle sound of other diners, and the constant buzzing of waitstaff, though none came near them. </p><p>“So, Harry,” Riddle said, the lilt of a question still staining the tone, as though he really did have a choice in the matter, “will you have a drink with me?” There was such a sugar-sweetness to the way he spoke that it was almost sickening to hear it, and even more sickening to know that Riddle was obviously enjoying making him squirm. Well, this wasn’t the way that he intended this evening to go, but he might as well make the best of it now that it was happening. </p><p>Harry gritted his teeth, “fine,” he said, “if that’s what you want.”</p>
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